Not exactly a band of raging lefties. The American Association of
Retired Persons and Blue Cross Blue Shield were among the opponents of
HillaryCare in the 1990s. The AARP is helping us lead the fight this time but I'm sure BCBS was disappointed in the results of this poll.

Just over the weekend, we learned that the idea of a public option enjoys 72% support -- including 50% of Republicans -- in the latest NYT/CBS poll.A Republican at the last Downers Grove Township Board meeting took one of our petitions and folded under the DG Dems name and address at the bottom, stuck it in the copying machine and printed it out to get signatures.

The president wants a public option. A majority of the US House of Representatives wants a
public option. It's likely a majority of the Senate wants a public
option. Doctors and nurses want a public option.A very clear majority of Americans want a public option. Oh, and yeah not
incidentally, a public option makes a lot of sense as a matter of public policy.

It's time for us to stiffen the backs of wavering US senators and demand they give America a decent healthcare system instead of protecting the status quo. Yes, we can do this just as we elected President Obama. So make those phone calls, crank out those faxes, send those emails if you have to (even though they are much less effective) and download our petition and ask neighbors, friends, family, and co-workers to sign.

Articles about Medical Malpractice Insurance Reform

"Tort Reform" is a decades long campaign to bolster insurance company profits:

House Gets Its Act Together on Health Reform While Senate Dawdles

As I mentioned earlier today,
the past week or so has given health reformers a severe case of
whiplash. First, an early version of the Senate HELP committee bill was
unveiled in an uncompleted form,
after divisions between the committee's Republicans and Democrats on
key issues like the public option, and the employer mandate couldn't be
resolved in time for hearings. Unfortunately, that's the only
legislation the Congressional Budget Office had to work with, and,
perhaps unsurprisingly, they found it would cost about $1 trillion over
10 years while leaving, dozens of millions of people uninsured.

And this, remember, is the committee that's putting together a
liberal bill, without worrying too much about rapprochement or
bipartisan compromise. All of that bellyaching was going on in the
Senate Finance Committee. The CBO determined that that
bill would cost about $1.6 trillion over 10 years--significantly more
than the conservative committee wanted to pay. And they've gone about
making up the difference not by upping the ante on cost-cutting reform
efforts, but by slashing
the very benefits and subsidies reformers are fighting for--including
the public option which has been scrapped, in the Finance bill, and
replaced with a plan to create regional, non-profit co-operatives (more
on that in a bit).

Hearings on that bill won't begin until next month, leaving Congress
only days of session to complete the entire legislative process before
their ambitious pre-August recess deadline.

But the story in the House is much different.

At her
weekly press conference on Thursday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi held up her
end of the bargain. "I'm saying we will have a public option in the
House that will be real," she said. "If it's not real, it's no use
doing. And if we don't do a public option, I'm not sure that we have as
effective a public health care reform as we wish."

And compared to the disarray in the Senate, the House is pretty well
poised to deliver. The three committees of jurisdiction there have
agreed on a single piece of legislation, including a fairly robust
public option, and, of course, the House GOP can't resort to a
filibuster. Assuming it passes, the opponents of the provision will
have to choke it off at several points along a lengthy political chain.
They'll have to win out over the HELP committee to keep it out of the
finalized Senate bill; then they'll have to get it stripped out of the
final bill during conference; if they fail, they'd have to filibuster
the conference report (something which rarely happens); and if they
were to succeed in that regard, they'd have to fight the fight all over
again, with less leverage, during the budget reconciliation process in
October.

All of which is to say that despite all the sturm und drang last
week, we're basically right back where we started--and the public is on
the reformers' side.